More than pocket changeExhibitions make withdrawals from museum's vaults

January 04, 2009|ANDREW S. HUGHES Tribune Staff Writer

ELKHART Dr. William Luther couldn't have found a more appropriate place to deposit his coin collection when he donated it to the Midwest Museum of American Art. Nor could the museum, which is located in the former St. Joseph Valley Bank building on Main Street, have been more prescient when it scheduled its first exhibition of the Luther Family Coin Collection, "The Art of Currency," this winter through Feb. 22. "In this day and age, when everyone is thinking about money," curator Brian Byrn says, "this is perhaps more timely than we thought it would be. ... That was the joke: 'Where's the old money?' Now we say it happens to be in the vault." For the time being, however, it's in one of the museum's two galleries devoted to changing exhibitions, as the lead-in to a second exhibition drawn from the museum's vaults, "Selected Gifts to the Permanent Collection: 1998-2008," also through Feb. 22. A native of Rhode Island, Luther moved to Elkhart in 1960 to work at Miles Laboratories and, along with his wife, Claire, was a charter member of the museum. A little more than a year after the museum presented the Smithsonian Institution's "The Art of the Stamp" exhibition in winter 2006, Byrn says, Luther approached him and museum director Jane Burns about donating his coin collection to the museum. "It's something that everyone has access to, so we thought this would be a good way to help people rethink this: 'Who designs these? How are they used?'" Byrn says, stressing the fine-art and educational aspects of displaying the collection. "Coins are like low-relief sculpture. ... Coins are involved in the political, cultural and religious history of the country, and when you get into the story part of it, that's what I think makes it come alive." Although Luther, who died in July at 85, had begun collecting coins when he was 10 and had amassed thousands of them before offering his collection to the museum, Byrn says, the former country doctor who had helped to found a library in the Maine town where he practiced medicine before moving to Elkhart spent the last year of his life enhancing his collection for the museum's sake. "In the course of a year, and knowing he probably wouldn't live to see this collection on display," Byrn says, "he spent about $30,000 buying coins to put into this collection. ... We're showing exactly 2,395 coins, and that's a little over half of the collection." Luther, however, found much of the collection in his pocket change. "Eighty percent of the coins, he pulled out of circulation," Byrn says. "Back in the '30s, you could still find Buffalo nickels, Indian head pennies or Barber dimes (liberty head dimes named for the designer, Charles Barber). It was possible then to pull these out of circulation." The Luther Family Coin Collection includes a "very valuable and rare" copper 1793 large cent, the oldest coin in the collection and one of the first pennies minted by the U.S. government; uncirculated five-coin proof sets from 1952 to 2007; and commemorative coins, such as ones for President Richard Nixon and the Olympics. "We even have a 1958 Elkhart Centennial token," Byrn says. "It was worth 50 cents in 1958. It says you could take it to any bank in Elkhart through Sept. 17, 1958, and get 50 cents. There were only two banks in Elkhart then (including the St. Joseph Valley Bank). You could probably have gotten a Franklin 50-cent piece. Franklin was on the half-dollar up until 1964, when Kennedy was put on the half-dollar." Eighty-five percent of the collection is American, with 14 different types of coins and 36 different designs. "I think you can see that when the U.S. Mint gets more and more aggressive about marketing coins, they start employing more artists to honor presidents, events, patriots," Byrn says. "There's all kinds of stories about the engravers and the mint directors and the secretary of treasury." The curator points to the museum's 1909 SVB Lincoln cent, which was issued to honor the centennial of the 16th president's birth, as an example of one such story, as well as one of the collection's most valuable pieces. "That stands for San Francisco and Vernon Brenner," Byrn says. "He was a Lithuanian immigrant who was so proud to be in America that he put his initials in big letters on it, which caused an uproar, and they had to reissue it." Money, in a different sense, Byrn says, also led to the "Selected Gifts to the Permanent Collection" exhibition. Long before the 2008 economic downturn, he and Burns decided to create exhibitions from the museum's permanent collection for a three-year period. "We were just kind of looking ahead," he says. "After the Smithsonian show was so costly and we saw some of our numbers dwindle, particularly from schools, we said we have a permanent collection of more than 2,500 works and that we should start looking at that." The museum certainly has the material for such a project: Since 1998, close to 1,200 works have been donated to the museum, bringing its total collection up to approximately 2,600 works. The 47 works in "Selected Gifts" include works by such regionally connected artists as Elkhart native Harriet Monteith, Goshen College art professor and sculptor John Mishler, Texas-based sculptor and Elkhart native Jim Huntington, and Ted Drake, the artist who designed the University of Notre Dame's leprechaun and the Chicago Bulls' logo. It also includes works by such internationally famous artists as Jasper Johns, Philip Pearlstein and the husband-and-wife furniture-making team of Charles and Ray Eames. Contemporary realists Joseph Sheppard and Terry Rodgers have works in the exhibition as well, but one of its great strengths is a number of works by pioneering but lesser-known abstract painters from the mid-20th century, including Irene Zevon, William Baziotes and Fritz Pfeiffer. For the exhibition, Byrn positioned the Eames chair in proximity to a number of early Modernist and Abstract works. "That particular chair would be considered abstract in its design," he says. "It's certainly Modernist. It was created in 1946, and as we came out of World War II, the New York school was picking up steam. That's sort of pulling that relationship, showing a functional chair of Modernist design with Modernist paintings."